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Personal posts describing cheating and stealing in Las Vegas

The Cheaters: Turning Vegas Around

Finally, my novel: The Cheaters: Turning Vegas Around is available on Amazon.com.  I am unable to provide a direct link to the novel through WordPress.com.

Copy and paste: The Cheaters: Turning Vegas Around into Amazon’s book website and my novel will come up.  It is available in both paperback and for the various e-readers.

I uploaded a picture of the front cover.

Thanks,

Ed.

In present-day Las Vegas, a trio of hustlers—“cheaters” in gambling parlance—join forces to take a renowned casino for $25 million.

➢    Eddie, 35, withdrawn and highly intelligent, is the accomplished card sharp and casino defrauder who masterminds the complex scam.

➢    Marla, the beautiful young woman who becomes Eddie’s lover, is a novice at cheating but, under Eddie’s tutelage, proves to be a quick study.

➢    Clay, Eddie’s mentor, is a veteran scam artist, former casino boss, and now Eddie and Marla’s partner-in-crime.

Each has committed his share of sins but, despite the heady rush that goes along with the cheating lifestyle, each swears that this unprecedented score will be his last.  Cheaters charts the formation of the scheme, its step-by-step implementation, and the many twists that threaten to blow it apart.  To pull off their coup, Eddie Marla, and Clay must descend into a world of mobsters, crooked cops, compulsive gamblers, murderous casino insiders, and ingenious scammers. Their bag of tricks—computer chips, ultrasonic sound transmission, and good old sleight-of-hand—provide the reader with a virtual education in the larcenous ways of today’s professional cheats.

The Cheaters: Turning Vegas Around taps into America’s vast and growing interest in casino culture. Witness the proliferation of televised high-stakes poker, as well as recent books like Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Moreover, Cheaters is the first contemporary novel about high-end casino scammers written by a consummate insider. As a former general manager of a casino in Aruba and manager of the surveillance room at a Las Vegas outfit, I am aware of the endless varieties of casino scams. As a 21 “mechanic” for blackjack back in the1960s and ’70s, I cheated players for the casino. And as a gambler, I learned not only how to cheat at 21, but also how to manipulate slot machines, cheat the roulette games, and rake in the rewards.

The Magnetic Roulette Ball

For many years casino bosses scoffed at the notion of a magnet being put inside of a standard acetate or nylon roulette ball, which was standard for all casinos.  They felt it would be impossible.

The casino boss’ reasoning made sense.  How could you cut open a roulette ball and put a magnet inside?  The cutting would be easy enough, but how would you put the ball back together?

There was a way to get a magnet inside of a roulette ball, and we devised it, also figuring out how to control the gaffed roulette ball.  What good is it to have a small magnet inside of a roulette ball without the power to influence it?

I wore a powerful Alnico magnet on the top of my upper left thigh underneath very baggy slacks, which performed the function of hiding the magnet.

The magnet was heavy, about 25 pounds, 10 inches long, four inches wide and three quarters of an inch thick.  I couldn’t keep it in place without some modification to the magnet.  We had a leatherette cover made for the leg magnet with a loop at the top so a belt could pass through it.  This was still not enough to hold it in place so we made a strap that ran from the loop under my shirt to my shoulder.  That did it for the support.

It was not magic to get a magnet inside of a roulette ball if you made your own roulette balls from scratch, and that’s what we did.

When I write “we” the other half of “we” was the same guy I was involved with in the lead bottoms I wrote about in a previous post.  “We” are still good friends and I talk with him often.  His initials are R.M. and I am putting this in as an inside joke between R.M. and I. He is now a respectable businessman and if he wants to tell somebody who R.M. is, it’s up to him.  I’m sure he’ll laugh.

R.M. and I went to a machine shop in Los Angeles and requested the manufacture of our desired ball molds so we could cast our own balls.  We explained to the machinist, in order to enlist his aid in the design, that we were inventing a kind of pinball machine game that utilized plastic balls of different diameters that were to contain small pieces of metal of varying weights in the center giving each ball a different weight but the same appearance.

He was most helpful with the various-sized molds that were eventually developed out of aluminum.  He constructed molds that separated into two halves, a bottom and a top.  Each half of the mold had half the diameter of a roulette ball machined into the surface.  When the two surfaces of the mold met, the interior concave surfaces formed an almost perfect sphere.

The top half of the mold had a quarter inch diameter hole drilled into the center of its concave section that reached into the top half of the mold.

We returned to Vegas with our molds.

We had purchased a common colorless liquid resin from a hobby shop.  The plastic resin came with a catalyst, which when added during the ball manufacturing process, caused the special roulette ball to harden exactly like a normal acetate or nylon roulette ball.  The hardening took five hours.

Then we had the bottom half of the ball poured to within one sixteenth of an inch below the rim of the bottom concave sphere of the aluminum mold.  We would wait for approximately two hours and then place a three-eighths inch long by one-eighth inch thick diameter “indox” magnet on the center of the top half of the partially hardened tacky half-ball.  Now the indox magnet would be exactly in the center of the sphere.  (One eighth of an inch equals two sixteenths of an inch, thus the reasoning for placing the indox magnet one sixteenth of an inch below the rim of the bottom mold.)

We then attached the top half of the mold and poured more liquid plastic through the quarter inch shaft of the top half of the mold.

We used indox magnets because they produced powerful magnetic fields, were light in weight and had reverse polarities.  One end would repel and the other would attract.

We used the reverse polarity magnets because we felt that when the roulette ball was in the roulette wheel-head race it could be more easily knocked out of the race by the magnet on my leg because it was either pulling or pushing the ball, maybe both.

After waiting five hours we would remove the ball from the mold. The ball would have a “stem” that we cut off with a hacksaw blade.

The machinist had manufactured special-hardened, extremely sharp steel cutting dies to remove the seam between where the two halves of the sphere had been joined.  We had a different sized die for each size ball we were to make.

By hand, we shaped the ball by rolling it against the steel dies, which had a concave shape to match the resulting shape of the balls, until we had an almost perfect sphere.  We used a micrometer to measure and achieve the desired size.  Shave a little, measure a little, shave a little.  Measure until the desired result was achieved.  For example, a ball that was a true half-inch (five hundred thousands of an inch) or whatever size we were making.

Roulette balls are not white; they are more of a cream or ivory color.  We added color pigment to the plastic resin to achieve whatever color we wanted.  I made a purple ball once during our practicing of how to make the balls.  My partner didn’t think purple was practical, and it wasn’t, but I did it anyway.  I was having fun. The ball was useless but I liked it.

There is an old cheaters’ saying, “Now that we know how to do this, we have to find somebody to do it to.”

Now we had to get one of our special balls into a roulette game.

We had our own roulette wheel head and practiced for six to eight hours a day for a month until I was able to knock the ball into a section of 10 numbers fifty percent of the time—enough to get the money.  With the dealer getting out 20 spins an hour, we figured we would earn $1,300 an hour betting $5.00 per number.  Normally, we would begin with betting $1.00 per number and my partner would slowly increase his betting in increments of one or two units to make it look more natural.  This was enough to win the money without creating too much steam from the pit help.

The two of us would work in conjunction.  I would “switch” our ball for the casino’s roulette ball.  It was simple enough to do.  I would stand at the edge of the roulette wheel-head, at the end of the table with the magnetic ball cupped in my right hand.  When the casino’s ball slowed down and was on its last spin, ready to drop from the wheel-head race in which it was spinning, my cohort would be standing at the opposite end of the table.  We had eye contact and he was excellent with his timing of buying in with a hundred-dollar bill, throwing it on the layout at the last second, “rounding” the dealer so the dealer would turn his head for just a moment.

It was too late for the dealer to give him chips at this point, but the dealer wanted that bill off of the layout so he’d reach out and grab it. This is all the time I needed.  Everybody was distracted.  I’d put my right hand over the edge of the wheel-head rim and let the casino ball roll into my hand, “catching” it and simultaneously dropping our magnetic ball. The ball would bounce around and settle in a number like it was supposed to.

This was before the colorless Plexiglas shields were put up around the roulette wheel-head and chip bank—to prevent this type of thing—where players could stand and watch.

The next step was for me to go put the magnet on and then come back to the game.  I did not want to get caught with a magnetic ball in my hand and a magnet on my leg.

My friend and cohort would be making one-dollar bets on certain numbers until I got back to the game. I sat in the seat closest to the wheel head.  This was so I could move my left leg under the wheel head to knock the ball out of the race.

We had decided on using the ten numbers after the double zero because the green of the double zero was twice as wide as the green single zero, which afforded me the luxury of instantly locating the section I was lining up with the ball.

My partner was betting the same section of numbers on the wheel every spin of the ball: the 10 numbers following the green 00, namely 27-10-25-29-12-8-19-31-18-6.

He would now stand in the middle section of the table, as he had to reach the number “six” at one end of the table and the “31” at the other when placing his bets.

Of course we did not acknowledge each other.  If we were to get caught we did not know each other.  I was going to take all the heat.  Young and dumb.

I had to watch more than one thing at a time: the spinning roulette ball as it slowed to a speed that would look normal when it was knocked from the race by my leg magnet, ensure the ball was lined up with the green double zero when I moved my leg under the wheel-head to affect the ball, all the while making meaningless notes on a pad of paper.

I also had to pay attention to the pit help.  I used to slick my hair back with Vaseline, wear thick horn rimmed glasses to look like a nerdy “system” player.  All casino people laugh at system players.  When I was sure I was going to knock the ball into our section, I’d touch the top of my head and my partner would try to get down bigger bets.

R.M.  had dealt craps for years and had the ability to get the chips down really fast.

We developed a “route” of casinos.  We kept track of what date we had been there, which shift and so on.  We never played near the end or beginning of a shift.  We did not want to be pointed out by a dayshift boss to a swing shift boss.  There were no cameras in those days so that was certainly to our benefit.

We would win a couple of thousand dollars or so at each casino and quit.  We did not take the magnetic ball out of the game(s).  We should have, but felt it would be easier to not have to put it in again a month later.

We also made the mistake of having two magnetic balls on separate roulette tables in the same casinos.  Somehow, one of the casinos had moved a roulette ball from one table to another, and upon closing the table on the graveyard shift and placing everything under the chip bank cover, two roulette balls moved and stuck together.

This made the newspapers and our scam was over.  Some bosses began carrying little magnets in their jacket pockets and they would pass them over a ball every once in a while to make sure it wasn’t magnetic.

Still, the casino people did not completely understand how this scam worked, how the magnetic ball was controlled.

On occasion, a roulette ball will come out of the race, hit the wheel head and bounce out of the wheel head and land on the floor.  Customers and pit help will look for it.

This happened once with our magnetic ball and the ball stuck to my leg magnet.  People were looking around for the ball and I took it from my leg, bent down to the floor and said, “Here it is.”

Another time we had a young woman carrying the leg magnet in her purse for us.  She had a big leather bag for a purse that she slung over her shoulder to carry the magnet, as it was too heavy for her.  It weighed about 25 pounds and she went about 105 pounds, at most.

After I put one of our magnetic balls into a game, I would meet with her in the lobby and she’d hand me her purse and I would go into a bathroom and put it on in a stall.  Otherwise I would have to go to the car, take off my baggy pants and put on the magnet inside the car.  It was not the most comfortable thing and the car would not always be parked close by.  Besides, passersby could see into the car.

She was carrying the magnet down the street and got too close to a metal lamppost.  Her bag stuck to the lamppost and she couldn’t pull it off.  She kept struggling with it.  I was about 100 feet behind her, made it to her quickly and pulled the bag off of the pole.

She learned to stay away from metal things like slot machines and lampposts.

I think the roulette ball gaff could be done today with some kind of electronic device inside the ball and a remote control unit with which to influence the ball.  Just need a dealer to put it into the game.

And there are plenty of dealers with larceny in their hearts.

The Wheel of Fortune – AKA The Big Six

I had been whacking out—cheating blackjack players—at a club in North Vegas. It wasn’t so bad in North Las Vegas then.  Now it’s a rough spot to go to or live and work.  The owner of this joint and I had a falling out about money.  I charged $100 per day cash, got a paycheck like the regular dealers were paid (so I would be legal on the books), plus a percentage of what I won.

This was the normal deal for a mechanic.  The owner was being greedy.  He was a player and would take the winnings from his small casino and gamble it away in other casinos.  He told me he could no longer pay me the $100 per day because the casino wasn’t doing well.  I knew better so I quit.

After a short vacation, I dropped by a casino at which I had worked before as a 21 mechanic.  I spoke with the owner and he told me he had been pressured into letting a union form.  The pressure came from some local bad guys and he originally thought it would be OK to have a dealers’ union.  But the union people were stealing way too much and he couldn’t fire dealers without proof.  He knew what percentages the games were supposed to hold and they weren’t holding them.  It was like they had taken over his casino.  He told me that he was planning on taking out all of the gaming tables except for the Wheels of Fortune – AKA The Big Six – thus putting the union dealers out of a job.  He was a smart man and had an MBA way back then.  The Big Six dealers had been there for years so they had seniority in the union they had been forced into joining.

Bye-bye bad-guys union.

While working in this casino before, I had wondered why the Big Six dealers had stayed Big Six dealers and had not moved on to learning the other games.  The owner told me the reason: The Big Six dealers who had been with him for years received ten percent of the drop—the cash money that they put into the drop box.  I hadn’t known this and discovered there were actually Big Six “mechanics.”  Those guys could actually aim the wheel and make it stop on the number they wanted—or in a section they wanted—usually one with mainly ones and twos.

I told the owner that I didn’t have the skill to aim the wheel.  He said, “You’ll learn, and don’t steal more than a $100 a day from me,” and smiled.  He was a really good guy and he knew I’d leave plenty for him and I had no scruples about cheating the players.  Of course I knew he got into the drop boxes to take a bunch of cash before the accountants got to them and counted the money in the count room.

The Big Six, if spun on the square, should hold about 25 percent.  The owner wanted more like 95 percent so he could take enough cash so it appeared to hold 25 percent.  This is why he allowed the Big Six dealers to take money.  He knew by the percentages we were holding how much we were taking.  As I said, he was a smart man. Nice, too.

The Big Six is divided into a number of equal segments separated by brass spokes. Each segment is associated with numbers.  The winning number is indicated by a flexible piece of rubber, which is mounted on a non-flexible surface.  This flexible piece of rubber rubs against the spokes as the wheel spins and is what slows down the wheel until it stops.

It took me a couple of months to learn the controlled spins.  One of the Big Six dealers—a pinball machine junkie—taught me the spins.  I had had coffee many times with him when I had worked there before and he knew what I did, but we hadn’t openly talked about it.

I had wondered before why this Big Six dealer had never wanted to move over to the pit and learn the other games.  I figured he had to be stealing, too, on top of the ten percent.  He worked a different shift than I ended up working so I never knew for sure if he was stealing.

The permanent Big Six dealer taught me the various spins.  There are a few basic spins to use when learning to aim the wheel: the one-spin, one-and-a-half, two-spin, and the two-and-a-half.

It took me a month or so to get these spins down.  Another trick was to slowly back into the wheel with my right arm behind my back.  I’d look up to a small mirror, which was mounted above and behind the players, and use the triceps muscle in my arm to slow down the wheel if I thought it was going to go past where I aimed it.  Then after I had made the correction I would stand away from the wheel so the players could watch it stop on its own.

The different spins are based on the following:  While the players were making their bets, and I’d be giving them hype just like in a carnival on the boardwalk, I was playing with the wheel moving it to where I wanted it to eventually stop.  This was how the spins worked.  A one-spin would bring the wheel back right to where I had started.  So would a two-and-a-half and a one-and-a-half.  You can’t rely on only the one-spin too much because players say, “Come on, spin that thing.”

It really was serious stuff that took concentration.  It reminded me of a baseball player getting up to bat.  I’d position my feet just right—we all used the same stance—put my right hand on the wheel between where the spokes stuck out, my left hand on the leather lip of the table, rise up on my toes and go for the spin I was going to use.  I’d make the spin and as soon as I let the wheel go, I could tell if I hadn’t spun it hard enough.  If I hadn’t, I’d give it another little additional spin, by tapping the spokes on the wheel a little more until I felt okay about it.  You get so you can listen to the wheel and watch it to know where it’s going to stop.

Me and this other guy had an act.  We worked it around to where we shared one Big Six wheel near the front door where all the foot traffic was.  I’d yell at people who looked like flat suckers and get them to come over.  The other guy did the same.  By coincidence his name was Eddie.  All we lacked was a hook like they used in the days of vaudeville.

I’d tell the prospective sucker how much fun this game was and how it was very easy to play.  The only reason anybody would play the Big Six was because they didn’t understand the other table games.  Besides, all we had were the Big Six wheels.  “Look at all those ones on the wheel,” I would tell them.  “They are almost all dollars.  Bet a dollar on the one and I bet you’ll win a dollar.” Naturally I’d hit a one.  Then it was, “Try the two.  Bet your winnings on the two. Go ahead.” They would do it.  I’d hit a two.

“See how easy this is?” I’d say.

The value of the bills displayed on the table top, under glass, corresponded with the payoff the player would receive if she/he won a bet. They would place their chips on the bill amount of their choice.  They had to do this before the dealer spun the wheel.  They could not bet late because they would be dirty, no-good cheaters trying to gauge where the wheel would stop.  Some people!

Eventually I’d have them making all the bets on the table.  But there was only one 40 on the wheel.  The 40 was how the players would be suckered.  As I was giving them my rap I would mention several times what a bad bet the 40 was, that I hadn’t hit it in two months.  I kept reinforcing this.  The 40 was crucial in getting their money.

I showed them an almost foolproof way, I would say, to not lose their money.  I would get them to make certain bets and I’d hit them.  I’d let them get ahead, a little.  The player would be convinced that I didn’t care if they won.  It wasn’t my money they would win, it was this rotten casino’s money. Eventually I would get them betting bigger and they would be reaching into their wallet or purse.  I would be laughing and cajoling with them, get the cocktail waitress for them.

I’d get them to bet all over the layout until they had about $50 of their own money out there and then I’d hit the 40—the only bet they didn’t have covered.  I’d say, “Oh, the 40!  I haven’t hit that in two months.”  I’d say I was sorry but it would probably be another couple of months before the 40 hit again.

I’d encourage them to keep betting and many times they would.  When I could see they were getting tired of my act I would signal my partner, who was sitting just 15 feet away at the bar, to come in and take over.  He’d come in and I’d tell the players it was time for my break and good luck and tell my partner right in front of them to try and be lucky for them because they were real nice people and all that BS.  Then I’d go next door, have a drink, and flirt with the cocktail waitresses. My partner in this would continue my nice guy act and get them for more.

We weren’t dropping all the cash that people bought in with.  We made a deal that we wouldn’t put this thing on fire because if we took too much we might get fired.  The owner had told us how much we could take so we kept our part of the deal and kept it at $100 a day.

When people bought in with a $20 bill, I would give them their chips and fold the $20 into quarters.  Then I’d pull out the drop box paddle to drop the bill in the box and slam the paddle down real hard, simultaneously folding the bill up in my right hand and pulling my hand away real fast.  It was misdirection.  I would keep the bill in my right hand, hidden, and spin the wheel with the bill still in my hand.  Right after I spun the wheel I would move my right hand to my left underarm and put the bill there temporarily, all the while watching the players to see if they saw me take the paper money.  When the wheel would begin to slow down I would be saying—keeping their attention on the spinning wheel—“Is it going to hit the 20? Maybe the ten . . .” Then I would take the bill from under my arm and act like I was tucking in my shirt quickly and stick the bill in my tight slacks.  The bill would be inside my pants pressed against my stomach.

My partner, Eddie, and I would work a half hour on and a half hour off, unless we were working over some people.  Then we just stayed there as long as the people would ride us.

The two Eddies’ wheel put down, on average, about $2,000 on our shift.  At ten percent of the drop we ended up with $100 apiece and we stole another $100 and were paid top pay at the time, which was $27.50 a shift.  This was in the late ’60s and we were doing very well with our cash “bonus”.

The slot boss, who was a longtime trusted employee of the owner, would ask us how much he owed us, our percentage of the drop.  We kept track of the cash drop by arranging chips in one slot in the chip rack with the corresponding value of the cash that went down.  He’d go to the cage and get the money and slip it to us, surreptitiously sticking it in our back pockets.

One time on the Big Six I beat a dealer from the Golden Nugget out of a $1,000.  A dealer!  I was having a hard time believing it.  He got so pissed he turned the whole table over on its side.  Chips spilled all over the place. It was pretty funny.

Yes.  That is me in the photograph.  Click your mouse cursor on the picture and it will go to full size.

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Running Up Hands, the Hole-Card Switch and Idiots

There was a particular group of dealers from the casino next door who were morons.  They were relatively certain that I was cheating for the house.  It was their intent to catch me cheating them, but for what end I never did know, as they never caught me.  Three or four of them would sit at my game and I would deal to them.  They paid very strict attention to everything I did.

They came in almost every night after their shift and would lose their money – imbeciles.  If you think you are being cheated out of your money, why would you continue to go up against it, especially if you got busted every night?  They watched for me to deal the second card, but their problem was twofold, they were drunk and couldn’t tell an “ace from a deuce”­­— inside terminology meaning that they couldn’t tell if the top card was being dealt or the second card was being dealt.

There were more things in my arsenal than just dealing the second card.  One of the other things I did that was routine to me—and many other mechanics—was what is termed “running up a hand.”  When picking up the cards after a hand had been dealt and all bets attended to, I would pick up cards in a particular order.

Example: There are four players and a dealer—me.  The dealer on the next hand—me—would receive the fifth and tenth cards I had picked up: the first four cards dealt to the players, the fifth card dealt to the dealer—me—cards six, seven, eight and nine to the players, and card number 10 to me.

So, during the picking up of the cards, I made certain that the fifth and tenth cards were good cards for me, hopefully a face card and an ace.  But most often two cards with a value of ten is what occurred.  If a mechanic can show the players 20 every hand, he will get all the money.

Then I false shuffled the cards, carrying what is called a “slug.”  The slug was the 10 cards I had run up in the specific order.  I would make sure the 10 cards stayed together and ended up on the top of the deck.  I would offer one of the players the cut and do something that is called “hopping the cut.”  That means that when the player cut the deck, I would put the cards back in the same order they were before the player cut the deck, when I was picking up the deck to get ready to deal it.  It’s a sleight-of-hand misdirection thing.

The other thing I did was to switch my hole-card and had to peek at the next card(s) in the deck to know what they were.  These sucker dealers never picked up on anything.

The hole-card switch was not a well-known move.  I knew of one other mechanic using it.  It was something that most people thought was impossible.  Plenty of people had heard of the hole-card switch but didn’t know how it was done or discounted it as being BS.  It was my favorite move.  It was really a strong one to win the money.  I’ve uploaded two videos of myself switching the hole-card for my readers to observe.

It’s done with the deck hand and is the reason that casinos back in the day, when they finally found out how the hole-card switch was performed, made it a rule that a 21 dealer could not turn over his hole-card with his deck hand.

I don’t have a video camera so I used my Iphone’s video feature.  I taped it to a small tripod and made a little setup with an old green-felt 21-table layout.

This particular hole-card switch took me many takes to get a couple of decent switches.  This switch is analogous to somebody who more than 40 years ago was a decent piano player, but after the music stopped 40 years ago, it stopped for a long time.

Every once in a while the piano player sits down to fool around for 15 minutes or so playing a tune or two.  This is the same as me with a deck of cards.  Every few years I might pick up a deck of cards and practice a little and then stop.  I think to myself, Why am I doing this?  I have no reason to.

I could feel the pressure just performing the hole-card switch in front of my camera, the same move I used for years in live action and thought nothing of doing it.

In the videos you will see me walk up to the table, perform the move and then move away.  Before I approach the dealer position I had to start the video and then walk around to the dealer position and proceed.  When I finish the move, I move away because I had to go shut off the camera.

I thought I’d explain all this because this whole thing I’m doing, writing the blog, the pictures, the novel I wrote—is a one man operation.

Well, I do get some blog writing advice from my old friend Dan Bunker, by e-mail, as we live several hundred miles apart. Dan also copy edited my novel.

Many of you know Dan and, for those who don’t, we grew up in the same small town many years ago.  He was also a 21 dealer for a few years.  He was one of the good guys, though.  He is now a filmmaker.

Check out Dan and his wife Judy ver Mehr’s website: http://madmanmuntzmovie.com/

There are two hole-card switch videos.  One, the two-card switch, is of me just switching the hole-card.

The three card switch is an example of being stuck in a situation with my having 18: a face card as my up card and an eight as the hole-card.  18 is not a strong hand for the house.  The dealer can’t hit 18.  He has to stand pat on it.  What to do?

Try to find a ten-value card to switch in as the hole-card.  But sometimes I’d get real lucky and find a card with the value of three.  I would save the three for myself by dealing the second card.  When I turned over my hole-card, I would switch the eight that was in the hole for the three.  Then I would hit my now hand of 13 with the eight that had been in the hole, ending up with 21.

Of course this three-card switch works the same with the dealer having a ten-value card up and a seven in the hole and being able to find a four or having 19 and finding a two to switch in for the nine in the hole.

All these things worked great on the dealers who thought they were going to catch me.

They were just plain dumb.  If they would have caught me and tried to make a problem, I would have had them thrown out permanently, eighty-sixed.

I uploaded these hole-card switches I perform to YouTube.  They are under the name of Clay Parish.  Clay, is one of three protagonists in my novel The Cheaters, which I plan on uploading Tuesday.  It will be approximately five weeks before it is available.  I will continue to blog during that time and design my book covers, front and back.

Ed.

DISGRUNTLED DEALERS

I was going for the money—cheating players for the house—and the word had spread on the graveyard shift on which I worked: 2:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m., and that I was the cause of the square-John dealers not making any tokes.  Tokes are what casino people call tips.

At the time, it was a small shift, only about five 21 games open, one craps and a roulette wheel.  Everybody got along, but the dealers were bitching about their tokes taking a nosedive.  I wanted to keep them quiet.

The dealers were saying, and I quote, “How can we ever make anything?  As soon as a big player comes in, Curley goes in and chops off their head.”   They were upset and I wanted to keep them quiet and happy.

I began something new.  When I came in to begin my shift I would make a production of letting the regular dealers, who were also beginning their shift, see me take $200 in five-dollar chips out of different chip racks from the various games and put them in the toke box for them.  I also did not accept a share of tokes.  I was making way more money than they were, and of course my not taking a share was another attempt to keep them happy. Besides, nobody ever toked me.

If it was a particularly good night for business and I had brought in lots of money, I’d make another production out of stuffing another couple of hundred or so in chips into the dealers toke box, which they later counted up and split along with the tokes they themselves had received from the lighter action games.  I was paying them off with casino money to keep the natives from becoming too restless.

 

MY GALLERY

Putting chips in the toke box did not keep my situation entirely quiet, though. Word got out and the sucker dealers who should have known better would come from the casino next door on their break, get a drink from the bar, and then as many as seven or 10 of them would stand in front of my game about five feet back from the players.

They were no-nothing idiots trying to see what I was doing.  They wanted to see a mechanic in action–something they had only heard about—deal the second-card, something.  They did not know what to watch for, but they bothered me, bringing unwanted attention to me.

There was a security guard employed by the casino.  He was a big guy, six-feet-six, and looked like he should have been a tackle in professional football.  He was 35 years old.  I had asked him if he had ever lost a fight.  He told me that he had lost a fight once when he was in the Army. That was good enough for me.  He also carried a pistol.

His salary was $17 a shift and payroll taxes were taken out.  I began giving him a $25 chip every night when I came to work, which I took out of a chip rack on a game.  He liked me very much for doing this.  I’d go over to him, put a green $25 chip in his shirt pocket, and tell him to go cash it out.  It was a bonus with strings, a non-verbal contract.  He knew what was going on and what I expected.

Not only did I want him to stay close by in case some night the “stuff” would hit the fan because I got nailed, but I also used him as a “gallery dispersant.”

When my gallery formed up, Bob would clear it out.  He was nice and calm, even friendly to them, as he physically bumped into the gallery members forcibly and would say, “Come on guys, let’s move it along. This ain’t no golf game.”   They didn’t offer him any resistance, but they would be back on their next break and Bob would have to move them out again.

I would like to mention that I am ready to upload my novel, The Cheaters, to Amazon.  I will do this within the next couple of days.  I have been told it will take approximately four weeks before it appears.  During this time I will be designing my own covers, front and back.

I think I might have been writing posts that are too long so will continue more about what I wrote about today in my next post, which will be within the next couple of days.  If some agree that some posts are too long and technical, please comment about it.  Or if you think they are fine, please comment about that.  Please comment, either way.  I will go with the flow.

Thanks,

Ed

Randy Stones and another heart attack story.

I spoke with Randy yesterday.

He told me another heart attack story and I decided to make a short post out of it.

Randy was still breaking in at the Horseshoe learning to be a 21 dealer.  He was dealing to two guys for most of the night who were drinking and having a good old time betting it up decently, $50 to a $100 a hand.  One guy was playing two hands on second base—that’s the center of the table— and his buddy was playing one hand sitting on third base, the last seat.  The guy on third base  playing one hand goes all goofy looking, has a heart attack and falls on the floor.  He had just been dealt two cards and didn’t know what they were.

The guy on second base plays both of his own hands and then asks his friend who is lying on the floor what he wants to do with his hand.  The guy on the floor says, “What do I have?”

Second-base guy looks at the hand and says, “You’ve got 14.”

“What’s the dealer’s up card?

“He’s got a face card up.”

“Hit it.”

Heart-attack guy caught a face card and busted the hand.

An ambulance came and heart-attack guy was taken away.  His buddy stayed at the table playing and said he’d go over to the hospital later.

Randy is alive and well.

He doesn’t know what happened to the heart attack player.

RANDY STONES’ FIRST NIGHT, PLUS HEART ATTACKS.

In my first post to this blog I mentioned a friend of mine, Randy Stones.

During his very first night working in a casino, breaking in to be a 21 dealer, something happened causing him to think, “This is my kind of place.”

Randy liked action, excitement, and the adrenaline pump that comes with it.  He still does.

Randy had been on the job for a couple of hours fumbling around with cards and chips trying to get his hands to do what his mind was telling them.

At the beginning of Randy’s shift the casino manager had a player thrown out.  The player was a dealer who had in the past worked in the same casino in which Randy was just starting out.

This player was abusive and a loudmouth and became quite frustrated when he lost his money and would vent his anger aloud, throwing his cards at the dealer, swearing and bothering other patrons.

The disgruntled player returned in a few hours with a pistol.  He shot the casino manager in the stomach a couple of times.  One of the bullets somehow landed right next to Randy’s foot.  That is when Randy thought—This is my kind of place!

The casino manager, a man everybody liked, did not die from the gunshot wounds.  He returned to work but he was not the same and died a year later.

HEART ATTACKS

When I was a young break-in dealer and still in the fumbling around stage trying to get my hands to do what my mind was telling them to do, the 21 dealer at the next table to my right had a heart attack.  At the time I thought he was old.  I was 22 or 23.  He was in his 50s, had white hair, so in my mind he was ancient.

He called out the shift boss’ name, “Kenny!” and was holding the deck in his left hand, his right gripping the table trying to keep from falling backward.  I can to this day visualize it.  He collapsed and ended up on his back.

The degenerate players on my game who had seen it all didn’t miss a beat.  They watched the little emergency spectacle and kept making bets and asking for hit cards.  I dealt to them.  It was only a heart attack, after all.

The shift boss called to a dealer who was on his break and motioned for him to take over heart attack guy’s game.  Heart attack guy died a couple of minutes later.  The action never slowed.

Another time a woman was shooting craps.  She was a high roller and was betting it up pretty good.  She had all the numbers covered.  Her son was with her, but he was just watching.  The woman had a heart attack and fell to the floor.

The first thing the son said before he turned to assist his mother was to one of the crap dealers, “How much does she have on the layout?  Take all her bets down.”

First things first, of course.

***************

I wanted to mention that I am making headway with my endeavor to put my novel, The Cheaters, up on Amazon as both an e-reader and in book form.  After uploading The Cheaters, I have been informed that it will take four or five weeks for it to be available to the public.

I would also like to thank my longtime friend Dan Bunker, for his conferring with me and showing such interest in my blog and novel.

Ed Curley.

While Working in Surveillance I Caught a Rookie Dealer Dealing the Second Card.

During the late ‘80s I was working in a surveillance room—which at one time was referred to as the “eye in the sky”—in a major Las Vegas casino.

The casino employed me because of my knowledge of stealing and cheating.  I had “turned my collar around,” as the saying goes.  I was from a different era, before cameras and video recorders.  The old adage, “It takes a thief to catch a thief,” holds true.  Also knowing the owner on a personal level helped me to get hired.

With the advent of video cameras and recordings it was a smart thing to not try and do the things I used to.  Not that the cameras and video recorders catch anything—it is the surveillance operator that must do the observing and catching.  However, the average surveillance operator knows nothing about stealing, either.

Floor help or a surveillance operator rarely catch cheaters and inside thieves.  They are usually fingered.  It is usually pretty much the same story: a disgruntled ex-girlfriend, ex-friend, ex-wife . . . Some people steal and tell more people about it than need to know.  If you need someone to cash out chips for you, it had better be somebody you know really well and trust.

When I caught this young dealer, a kid really, he was about 22.  I had been watching him for more than a month off and on, as I had other things to do besides watch him.  He was dealing a single-deck game and he caught my attention by making a false move, pretending to deal the second card from the top of the deck.   I was quite familiar with this, as I used to do the same thing.

This false move is done on purpose to “warm up” the floorman, or perhaps surveillance, to this second-card move, so they are accustomed to seeing the hit-card delivered to a player in this manner.  He was also simultaneously moving his deck-hand too much when he was making his false move, a giveaway for a poor second-card dealer.

I felt that he was going to do something and kept watching him.  I wasn’t sure if he was planning on just practicing under live action the way I used to when I was roughly his age.  I used to practice dealing the second card without knowing what it or the top card was.  I was just practicing dealing the second card during live action and getting my confidence level up.  It is one thing to practice dealing the second card from the top of the deck at home in front of a mirror, without feeling any pressure, but it is much different to do it live with real players and the pit boss and floormen behind you.

One night the kid was standing at a dead game, which means there were no players.   A player walked up to his game.  This player was a regular player in the casino.  I put the kid’s game up on several monitors simultaneously, zoomed in a couple of cameras from different angles and kept a couple backed out.

The player played three hands betting $75 a hand.  I could see it coming.  The kid had a face card up, a value of ten.  He looked at his hole card.  The player didn’t hit the hands he should have.  This player was an experienced player and I knew he knew better.  The kid had to have signaled the player that he had a stiff hand, a bad card in the hole for the dealer.  It’s called “sitting on a stiff.”

The kid had a terrible peek, obvious.  I had an affinity for the kid, but I knew I was going to nail him.  His hands were shaking.  He went for the second card and missed it. He started snatching at it, trying to grab ahold of it.  I knew the feeling.  I could empathize with him.  I actually felt bad for the kid; he was falling apart.  He finally got the second card out and busted his hand.

He took chips out of the rack to pay the player and he was still shaking.  He tried to cut into the player’s chips to pay him off but he was spilling chips, shaking, trying to control himself.

He took a chance and had performed terribly for half of $225 (three times three $75 bets).  The player got up and left.  If the kid had been any good and didn’t get shook up he could have dumped off a lot more money if I wasn’t watching.  In this casino three $75 bets was nothing.

If I were to offer the kid advice before he did this for the first time it would have been to go have a couple of drinks or take a Valium to calm himself.

I reviewed the tapes a couple of times and debated with myself as to whether I should finger the kid.  I knew the owner personally and he had put me in the sky and was paying me to catch this type of thing.  The owner was a really nice guy and had been in this business all his life and was in his early 50s.  I knew he wouldn’t want this kid to go to jail.  He had kids just a little older than this young dealer.  I had a son 18.

The Gaming Control Board fraud agents would have watched that tape, had me explain it in court, and that kid would have gone to jail with the wolves for seven years.  This kid barely shaved.  He had skin like a girl.

I called down to the casino manager.  He was a clean-as-a-whistle guy who had been in the business a long time but didn’t know about stealing or cheating.  He knew the games but that was about it.  He had a couple of teenagers, boys, he was raising by himself.

He came up and watched the tapes.  He was excited to see something like this.  I asked him if he wanted this kid to go to jail and end up being some con’s punk.  I could see his wheels turning.  “That kid isn’t much older than your boys,” I said.

“Shit, what do you think I should do?”

“Go down there and take him aside.  Tell him you just watched him in action on videotape with that player and he was terrible.  Rake him over the coals a little, scare him.”

“Christ, Curley, rake him over the coals? You know it’s a crime not to inform Gaming about this kind of stuff.”

“Quit worrying about your key license.  Tell him that when Gaming agents see that video he’ll be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and end up in Nevada State Prison in Carson City where he’ll be raped for seven long years. Let him plead for a while.  Then tell him you’re going to give him a pass.  Tell him to quit and go on down the street and look for another job.  Tell him he can use you for a recommendation, but he’s going down in this casino as a not-to-be-rehired.  He’ll never forget you and what you did for him”

I watched on a monitor as the two were talking and the casino manager was acting animated and looked like he was doing a good job of chewing this kid’s ass.

The casino manager came back up to Surveillance and told me what the kid had said, that he was practicing some magic tricks that somebody had shown him.

“What did you say when he said that?”

“I told him to shut up, that I wasn’t stupid and I was keeping the videotapes.”

We agreed to not tell the owner or anybody else about this.

I wonder whatever happened to that kid?

Lead Bottoms Were Placed in the Roulette Wheel Head Between the Chrome Frets

Why? —To cheat a casino at roulette.

A roulette wheel is constructed with a hardened springy wood between the frets at the bottom of the wheel head.  When the roulette ball stops spinning and drops from the wheel head race into the numbers, the hardened springy wood keeps the ball bouncing around from number to number before settling in the winning number.  This springy wood and the spinning wheel head are what make roulette random.

A good friend of mine, a man with the initials R.M. and I found a way—there are others—to overcome the randomness of roulette—lead bottoms.

In an American roulette wheel there are 18 black numbers and 18 red.  There are also two green numbers, 0 and 00, referred to aloud as “zero” and “double zero”.

For the purpose of this explanation only the black roulette numbers are of concern.

Back in the day, roulette wheels did not have a colorless Plexiglas shield encircling the roulette wheel head, as has been standard for many years.  This shield, among other things, is to keep people from reaching into the wheel head and inserting things like lead bottoms into the numbers in-between the metal frets.

Lead is soft and absorbs the bounce of a roulette ball, which is in direct contrast to the springy wooden material between the frets.

We constructed molds the same shape as the area between the frets.  We then melted lead and poured the molten lead into our molds to a depth of approximately one-eighth of an inch.  We did this until we would have 18 pieces of lead the exact shape as the area between the roulette wheel frets.  We then spray painted the lead bottoms black.

As you can see in the illustration, one lead bottom by itself will stand out as is apparent in the number 13.  It was imperative to get all 18 bottoms in so all the blacks looked the same.  Notice the wear between the frets in the other black numbers from the ball striking the area repeatedly.  Manufacturing the bottoms was the easiest part.  There was still a long way to go to “get the money.”

The next step was to find a casino, usually on a slow graveyard shift, that had a roulette wheel closed.  The wheel cheques and chips would be covered and locked.  However, the wheel head was exposed, vulnerable.

In readying ourselves to put in the lead bottoms, my cohort and I, would coat the underside of the lead bottoms with a heavy pressure-sensitive adhesive, a type of glue similar to that on post-it notes but much stronger.

We then taped aluminum foil to the underside cardboard of a legal tablet and stuck the bottoms to the aluminum foil.   The pressure-sensitive adhesive had a dual purpose: to keep the lead bottoms stuck to the underside of the tablet, for easy access, and when inserted between the frets they would be in there solid in the event somebody got curious and touched one.  It would not do for a dealer or boss to reach in and touch a bottom and be able to move it.

When we were ready to put in the bottoms, we would enter the casino behaving like a couple of sucker tourists.  We would walk up to a roulette wheel that had been closed along with the whole pit of gaming tables.  The bosses might glance over at us and one of us would be studiously writing on the top page of our legal tablet.  To anybody glancing at us we appeared to be writing down the numbers.  In the event somebody approached us we would have drawn a circle on the tablet and be writing down the numbers in the same position as they were in the wheel head.  We were purposely behaving like we were developing a system, which any casino person knows that you can’t beat roulette with a system.  A boss might look over at us occasionally and dismiss us as a couple of sucker tourists trying to figure out how to beat the wheel with a system.

While one of us were making our notations, the other would be watching all over the casino.  If everything was clear, nobody watching us, the “watcher” would say “go ahead.”  If I had the pad, I would reach to the aluminum foil, take a bottom and put it in a black number.  He would keep saying, “go ahead, good, good . . . hold it.”  When he said “hold it,” I would again begin making my notations until things were clear and he’d begin again saying, “go ahead . . . We kept this up until we had all 18 lead bottoms in.  If everything went the way it was supposed to we would be done in a minute or two.

The next step was to have somebody come in to “win the money.”

The take-off man would bet the limit on black.  The take-off person had to have some big brass cojones to stay there and keep betting.  There was definitely some heat with the bottoms.  The bosses would have a strong suspicion they were getting screwed because so many black numbers kept hitting.  The last time we did this I was working in a casino as a 21 mechanic on the graveyard shift.

It was downtown Vegas on Fremont street.  The owner of the casino that I worked for had bought the casino next door and was expanding.  The new addition was a few days from opening.  There was a roulette wheel sitting in there completely open and there was an opening in the wall one could walk through, that the construction people used as an exit and entrance to perform their remodeling work.

I was working in this casino and felt that if I were to enter the side under construction while on a break to put in the lead bottoms, another dealer on a break might wander in to look around too, and see me with the lead bottoms.

I phoned my partner, R.M., in the lead bottom gaff.  It was three in the morning and he was in bed sleeping.  He was there in 30 minutes.  He came in with his wife.  They walked into the construction area, stood at the wheel and put in the bottoms in less than a minute.  I was sitting at the snack bar having a cup of coffee.  I had chosen a seat that afforded me an angle, looking through the narrow entrance to the construction site, to watch them put in the bottoms.   A week later the new addition opened.

All the table games and slots were rearranged and the roulette wheel with the lead bottoms was put in the main pit where I worked.  The maintenance people had worked all night moving the equipment.  Of course working on the inside and being a trusted employee who cheated players for the casino, I was considered one of the good guys.

I was told they were going to open the wheel at eight a.m.  My shift ended at ten when the dayshift 21 mechanic came in.

The takeoff guy showed up when the wheel opened at eight.  He was the only player.  The limit was $200; he bet the limit.  Once our take-off man got a few thousand ahead, the shift boss told the wheel dealer to not give the roulette ball a long spin.  It made sense that the odds being in the house’s favor, the more spins the dealer got out the better the chance of winning back the money. It didn’t work out that way.

I stood there in the pit along with the dumb bosses and pretended I was bleeding money like they were.  They were dumfounded.  It was all I could do to not smile, maybe laugh out loud.

There was nothing they could do.  They couldn’t put me in there to get the money because the only way a player can be cheated in roulette is to short pay them on a complicated payoff.  Our man was betting eight $25 chips at a time so there was no chance of short paying him.

The walls were practically melting there was so much heat.  The owner came in around eleven and came downstairs to watch for a while.  He and I talked.  We were friendly.  He was the one who had hired me as a 21 mechanic in the first place.  My demeanor was one of ignorance.

My shift had been over for an hour but I was still hanging around pretending to bleed for the casino.  The real reason I was staying was I wanted to know exactly how much our take-off man was cashing out.  There is no honor among thieves and it is common for a take-off person to cash out and claim they cashed out less than they really did.  There is an old cynical saying, “We’re partners fifty-fifty—I count the money.”

He was going to get half for playing the money and riding a lot of heat.  If he had been arrested he would definitely go to jail because of the hard evidence.

The owner told me he was going to have the wheel examined, something was wrong.  I gave the prearranged signal to the take-off man to cash out and leave, now!

He cashed out $21,000.  This was a lot of money in 1967.

While our guy was cashing out, the owner had the wheel head brought up to his office.  On the way up the stairs the maintenance guys turned the wheel head sideways and one of the lead bottoms fell out.  The take-off guy made it out the door and down the street in the nick of time.

The case of the lead bottoms made the newspapers; it was a big article, detailed. The word was out.  The lead bottom gaff was over.

There were three other wheels in casinos in which we left the lead bottoms.  The plan had been to take them out after a play, but it was easier to make more bottoms.

I wondered for years about those other three wheels, but didn’t want to go back, as I had been the take-off man on those games.